Yeah, I know, someone could get a full copy of Commander Keen from a BBS.  I never did it though, because I had respect for people, and I didn't want my phone line tied up for god knows how long.

And are we talking all forms of piracy?  Or just the digital distribution?  Because the digital distribution aspect of piracy has taken off temendously this decade, mainly since the P2P craze starting in the early part of this decade, Napster and all those P2P clients, BitTorrents, etc.  I would need some compelling evidence saying otherwise to convince me otherwise.

so lame. Maybe if they didn't have 15 addons per installment, people might have enough money to buy the games. If you buy all the addons, like my manager does, you're spending about 400$ on sims per gen.
All the addons do is grant more furniture, professions and people/places to interact with. So lame.

Looks like your wrong.

It's also going to be one of the most purchased PC games.

Do you have to make a PC propaganda at every post you make?

Read my original post. I jusdt stated that the game will be heavily pirated. Whether it'll sell a lot or not (and it will sell a lot) is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.

You don't have to take every post as a threaten to your precious PC dream world

I was talking about piracy in general. My point was that it's not the Internet making people feel entitled to copy software, the Internet is just the most convenient form of doing it nowadays.

Before the Internet was popular, people would just copy games and programs to floppy disks and exchange them with each other. I know when I was young I got tons of PC games that way, in fact it was the only way I ever got PC games (I never even saw any shop selling them back then to tell the truth; it was easy to get music CDs and people bought them, but shops selling computer games must have been much more rare in Portugal).

And yeah, I remember some of those games had readme.txt files from BBSs, I guess some of the software originally came from one of those. Most of the people I knew had never accessed them, or even knew how to do it (me included).

The whole point to both D3 and SC2 will be online, which you can't get by blizzard on. In all honesty, the percentage of ppl that buy these for single player gaming are going to be a very slim margin. I'm VERY familiar with the PC Pirate scene. Ppl can try to do it all they want, most of those ppl trying to Pirate D3 and SC2 will buy it because of online play.

First of all, I'm pretty sure the leaked game is a beta, or at least not the final game.

Second, people are so seriously misinformed about the add-ons. They do add a lot of things, not only furniture and careers. Open for Buisiness added buisness micro managing, new types of shops, new skills, new interactions just to name a few...

I understand these might not mean so much for people who aren't into Sims, but for those who are it's a great deal of new things. Thing you don't understand is that it keeps the game fresh and there's so many new things to experiance in those Expansion Packs. Stuff packs however don't add a lot, but it's still better than the Sims 2 store (effing rip-off).

Some other games have expansions as well, Sims is certainly not the only one to do this. The difference between those games and Sims is that in it, there's so much more possibilities, the ideas for it are limitless (though the game has a limit before it gets broken). As a simmer, I do understand the purpose and I do buy them all. I feel sorry for people who don't at least aknowledge it, and move on, instead of criticising without knowing what they're talking about. Oh and as you well know, I also play games like Zelda, Mario, Star Ocean... I don't feel less of a gamer because I play Sims. It's not as casual as you'd like to think.

Third, EA probably isn't worried at all. Some people who pirated are going to buy the game afterwards (I know a great deal of people who will) plus even if they didn't, the game will still sell a lot.

I just found out my PC can play this game so I will be BUYING it when hits store shelves!

Is 400,000 over three weeks really the highest piracy rate (for last year maybe)?  Didn't Crytek make some ridiculous claim that there were 20 pirated copies to each purchased copy of crysis?  That was around June (08), and Crysis had sold over a million by January.  So according to them that should have been ~20 million downloads in a little over 2 months.  Unless sales had fallen extremely and piracy rose to the same extreme in the months between.  Even so it seems higher than 400k in 3 weeks.

Just noticed they said Spore was pirated 1.7 million times, but that is of course far below twenty times.  Granted I don't know how accurate this site is.